LNC & Idealism
The Law of Noncontradiction or LNC: ~(p &~p)
LNC implies idealism for the universe is thought of as limited to what is mentally conceivable (dependent on the mind), contradictions being inconceivable.
[quote=Wikipedia]Subjective idealism (Berkeley), or empirical idealism, is a form of philosophical monism that holds that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist.[/quote]
Discuss, please.
LNC implies idealism for the universe is thought of as limited to what is mentally conceivable (dependent on the mind), contradictions being inconceivable.
[quote=Wikipedia]Subjective idealism (Berkeley), or empirical idealism, is a form of philosophical monism that holds that only minds and mental contents exist. It entails and is generally identified or associated with immaterialism, the doctrine that material things do not exist.[/quote]
Discuss, please.
Comments (54)
Also, that's a mischaracterization of idealism. The idealist does not think that only the conceivable exists, for minds themselves exist yet are not conceivable.
Berkeley, for instance, arrives at the conclusion that the sensible world is made of another mind's mental states because it resembles our sensations and he takes it to be self-evident to reason that sensations can only resemble sensations. Thus, it follows that the external sensible world - the place our sensations give us some awareness of - is itself made of sensations. And as he takes it to be equally self-evident that sensations cannot exist absent a mind to have them, then the external sensible world turns out to be made of the mental activity of another mind.
Limiting the actual, the physical included, using the LNC (what our minds can't do) as a touchstone for what's possible/impossible.
That which sees can't itself be seen. Ergo, that which sees doesn't exist.
Quoting Agent Smith
:chin:
That's fallacious and it is not essential to idealism. As I explained, Berkeley - the ablest defender of the view - made no appeal to such arguments.
Minds exist. Minds are not perceivable and thus, as far as Berkeley is concerned, cannot be conceived of (for our imaginations can work only on what our sensations provide). But they exist and Berkeley affirms their existence. We know of them by reason, not sense.
So, you're working with a strawman version of idealism. No idealist worth their salt would argue that only that of which we can conceive exists.
What's the fallacy?
Quoting Bartricks
Yep, Berekely, he's behind this mess. Good to meet someone who's got a good handle on him. :up:
Reason "senses" patterns?
What's the real version of idealism, pray tell.
Never mind. I'm sure you have better things to do.
Show me!
No. Berkeley - the steel idealist rather than the straw one - thinks minds exist. He thinks it is manifest to reason that sensations cannot exist absent a mind to have them. As sensations clearly exist, a mind that is having them - your mind - exists. But the mind is not sensed, but inferred. So it is by reason, not sense, that we are aware of our own mind. And that too is how we can become aware of the mind whose sensational activity constitutes the external sensible world.
You think no one thinks contradictory things? That's absurd. People think contradictory things all the time. It's hard not to, for a lot of the time we don't have the time to figure out what contradicts what and which thoughts to stop having.
Anyway, your question seemed unrelated to the topic of the thread.
I just gave you an example: Berkeley's idealism. There's never been a finer defender of the view.
Berkeley's version is that everything is mind-dependent. It's in my OP.
Why is the brain/mind not a sense organ for patterns?
We're talking about idealism here, yes? What do idealists think the brain is? Do they think the brain is the mind? No. They think the mind is the mind and the brain is part of the sensible world - which is not a place, but the mental activity of another mind. It seems to me that you do not understand the idealist thesis.
Not necessarily. I could reject a premise and resolve the contradiction.
:lol:
LNC
1. If it's impossible to the mind then, it's impossible in reality.
2. Contradictions are impossible (to the mind)
Ergo,
3. Contradictions are impossible in reality
On some reading, at some level, this is idealism (reality can't do a contradiction is the takeaway) i.e. reality must make sense to the mind or else it can't be reality or a part of reality.
However reality, some tell me, has a few surprises in store for [s]us[/s] our minds - it defies the LNC on not one but multiple occasions I'm told. So what's this?
Then there is no such thing as seeing? Let's forget about minds for a minute. Colors and shapes exist, right?
Quoting Bartricks
How do you know when you are reasoning and when you are not if not by sensation? What form does your reasoning take as opposed to being irrational if not some sensation?
No one can as it would require one to hold something in the mind while at the same time not holding it in the mind. Contradictions are essentially a misuse of language.
Can you please tell me what exactly goes through your mind when, for example, I tell you to conceive (is this even the right word/concept?) the following:
1. Square & Not square (easy)
2. A quark & Not quark (hard)
By thought. We have thoughts and some of those thoughts are generated by our faculty of reason. And they tell us about the thoughts of Reason herself.
One point in your own post you linked to caught my eye - modeling/mapping reality. It appears that the idea is to create/generate mental models/maps of reality. The mind can't do contradictions - it's beyond its ken as it were - and so it rejects aspects of reality that are either contradictions or very nearly contradictions.
Notice here that reality doesn't have to be consistent (contradiction free), only the mental map/model has to be. This is like saying I can't understand Wittgenstein and so Wittgenstein is nonsense!
To my knowledge, the mind simply can't handle contradictions. It might appear as though we can take contradictions in our stride (vide cognitive dissonance), but remember they cause distress/anxiety and people go to great lengths, bend over backwards so to speak, to resolve the offending antinomy.
Experimenting on myself, I attempted to conceive of a ball wholly red AND wholly not red (I chose black). It was a failure, it can't be done, by me at least.
Returning to what I said my earlier post, I believe paradoxes, like anything else for that matter, can be put to good use. I compare them to statements that computers can't parse - DOES NOT COMPUTE! I believe they are portals to nirvana, at least in a Zen context (koans are paradoxes, that seems to have been the aim in formulating them anyway).
One problem with arguments from (in-)conceivability is that what are called 'private mental states' can have no significance for serious inquiry.
A more worldly approach would be to note that almost no one knows what to do with phrases like 'the ball that's red all over and also not red all over.' (It's thinkable that such a way of speaking could become useful, as in 'I love her and yet I don't.'
IMV, one the fundamental confusions in philosophy is taking a realm of shared logical intuitions and qualia for granted as foundational ur-stuff and trying to construct a world from it. In many ways it makes more sense to work in the other direction, and to think of the 'self' as a convenient fiction. It's a learned habit, the training of a single body to conform in terms of a central 'ghost' as target of praise and blame. So it must be (to jam it into the straitjacket of this myth) a morally responsible blob of freedom.
Why not? I can inquire into my own private mental states, can't I? It appears that our analytic brain has become used to doing what it does (analysis) symbolically. No symbol, no analysis. If our "world" is essentially analytic in character then, as Wittgenstein said, "the limits of my language are the limits of my world." However, there's more to our world than simply comprehending it, there's pure experience of it, something that actually takes place as part of the process of data collection, pre-analysis.
Quoting lll
Yes, almost. Let's say that's 99% of folks. Who are the 1% and where are they?
Quoting lll
Excellent. It doesn't have to be that way, and the truth has no obligation to reveal itself thus. However, what's the alternative? Every man for himself? That would be amazing! The question is, are we as similar as we think we are or are we, each one of us, irreconcilably unique? How do we know that this "shared intuitions and qualia" isn't an illusion i.e. there's no consensus, even if there is, it's in name only?
:blush: Sorry. G'day.
To me both are impossible. In trying to imagine a square & no square I picture a square and then picture a circle, but they both cannot appear in the same instance and in the same mental space unless they overlap, but then aren't the same object. The same for quark/not quark.
Contradictions are a misuse of language, or if you want to use maps, are a misuse of maps.
Some people claim that contradictions follow the rules of some language, but only when you forget the rule that language refers to things or events in reality (which includes our minds) (which like you said is necessarily not contradictory).
Same here! Yet...there has to be someone or something that can do this (conceive of or, as you put it, hold a contradiction). There's gotta be someone, there usually is someone, that's the law (every rule has an exception). And if (supposing) I can do it, so can you; that's another law. I don't think all men are mortal! :grin:
That's just a flight of fancy. On a more serious note, this: We can't look directly at the sun, you know that! Retinal burn would render you blind. However, there are workarounds for that...
Why are you so sure there's a you in there in the first place?
We've been brought up to behave as if there's a little self in here who pinks at a little screen and tweaks various knobs to make the body go boom boom. Unscrew the doors from their jambs, friend. Or shall I say friends, acknowledging that your skull may be haunted by a plurality of flu officers? Or are we both just ripples in the same semantic symbolic dance? (Have we plumbed the depths of what it mines to share a lung-wedge?)
'Unscrew the locks from the doors ! Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs ! (Wilt Whetman.)
Excellent question. This is actually the problem with taking qualia seriously. If there's a gap between the thing and its label (if words get their meaning from and refer to 'private experience'), then the synchronization of our practical affairs via our barking and scribbling is unbearably miraculous. I say the meaning must flow in the other direction, that synchronization of bodies is primary, and that the 'self' and its private theatre is a derived, convenient fiction -- something like smoke that rises from the fire of bodies working together to replicate like mad (products indeed of evolution.)
No man is a island. As I see it, one of the discoveries of philosophy (and not just of philosophy) is the primacy of the social. The penisolated ego gets it backwards. The muttering 'solipsist' is ringing changes on an inherited softwhere hugged and spanked into him as a child. The fantasy of God and the fantasy of the penisolated ego are two sides of the same coin. The unity involved is that of reason itself, which is a kind of distributed computation belonging to a tribe which is potentially the electrically networked species ('World City'). Just as species have DNA, which encodes and adjusts to experience, social organisms have culture. We are 'time-binding' 'fermented' beings. Our tongue tools are our greatest inheritance, it seems, and one wrench in this bag of tongue tools is the tall tale of the big lonely ego, which is ever so useful for training a body to police itself.
Example. 'I love her and yet I don't love her.' The point is that outright contradictions can work just fine for expressions of ambivalence. More specifically, we can imagine kids making up a game where the pieces can be 'completely red' and 'completely blue' at the same time. They'd know what to do with such a 'contradiction.'
Much of logic, seems to me, is just congealed and fetishized grammar. Heat it up and it's plastic again. We make the rules and forget we made them. The contingent is mistaken for the necessary. Tale as old as time.
That went over my head. Anyway...
You're correct to point out that the this idea of self we have maybe an illusion, but a distinction that seems relevant is this: Is our self an assumption or an inference? Does it matter which it is? Cogito ergo sum (Decartes).
It all depends I suppose on the definition of "self" or "I".
Quoting lll
:up: :clap:
Quoting lll
Yep, language is part of tbe so-called cognitive revolution. Even so, evolutionary success is not predicated on language; in fact shooting oneself in the foot seems to be the defining feature of those who can speak/write viz. garrulous apes (h. sapiens). We've understood the world, yes, but its destruction, our own too, is the price we pay.
Breeds there the man...
Quoting lll
The undercurrent!
Try to imagine that the subject is an invention/convention so ancient that we mistake it as the single most obvious fact. 'The soul is the prison of the body.'
Quoting Agent Smith
A magnificent tragicomedy ours. Are we better than roaches? I like us more, but I'm biased. If a roach had enough of a nervous system, it'd presumably grunt a preference for a lovely nymph with its own stretch of code (Do Not Annihilate.)
:ok: I have a vague understanding of what you're trying to get at. It's an interesting perspective. Taoist. Toooo Taoist? I dunno!
Quoting lll
[quote=Roaches]Bah! Humans![/quote]
Descartes was deceived by grammar (or pretended to be). Paraphrasing Nietzsche, mutterphysics is substance abuse. We learn to say 'I think' and we learn to say 'it rains.' Who's this thing that's raining? I think I prefer 'convention' to 'illusion' for the self. It's more about recognizing the contingency of any given content and less about digging through all the layers of 'illusion' or 'appearance' to find some core that is finally It. As one wit put it, it's turtles or interpretation all the way down. Perhaps there's no man behind the curtain but only more curtains for ever endeavor.
Just to be clear, I'm an egostic human like most, so this rather speculative transcendence of the ego convention is largely a flower in my theoretical bouquet. On the other hand, I do genuinely believe that we melt more and more into the cultural realm as we study. I mean that we see more and more how much we are just a rearrangement of the same old parts. Sure, there is some novelty and progress, but an education is mostly catching up with the dead.
Schopenhauer talks about a philosopher wanting to get his insights in a book so that he can die with the peace of an insect that's laid its eggs. I relate to that. The book is the life of that kind of man as as individual, which Schop saw as a kind of surplus or extra slice of the usual monkey that he mostly was. (His wife, or in S's case the whores he may have been sweet to, will remember something else, the tang of his flatulence after oysters perhaps. But for us he's a ghost made of words, to be conjured in our imaginations and in whom we can find not only ourselves but future generations who will read the footnotes we scribble in 'his' book.)
Here's a quote from Wittgenstein's Blue Book which seems relevant.
Part of this suggests to me that good philosophy is often offensively 'unintelligible' just because we don't want to hear it. Same with some science (the theory of biological evolution is beautiful in its way but terrifying, a veritable acid.) (I'm not saying the offensively unintelligible is therefore good philosophy.)
Here's one more quote from the Blue Book. It's along the lines of questioning the single ego habit and the tale of that grand ol' penisolated ghost.